10 September 2017 1:43 AM

As we grapple yet again with the problem of our wide-open borders, it is time we realised that there is another reason for this country’s huge migration problem.When I visited the Lincolnshire town of Boston a few years ago, to look at the revolution inflicted on it by mass immigration, I also noted the presence of knots of home-grown British louts and the existence of a smart and costly ‘resource centre’, offering tax-funded advice on how to inject illegal drugs. This plainly had something to do with the problem.At the last count, there were in this country at least 790,000 young people aged between 16 and 24 who were ‘not in education, employment or training’. I suspect that there are plenty more in this miserable category over the age of 24. Bear in mind that all politically important statistics are massaged in some way to conceal the ghastly truth.It is the jobs that such people used to do which are being done by migrants. As the liberal Left ceaselessly and rather stupidly point out, much of what goes on around us, from the NHS to the picking of fruit, the care of the elderly and the running of all those coffee shops, depends on migrant labour. They seem to think this is because the migrants are so nice, as many of them indeed are. BUT migrants don’t work for the NHS or Starbucks out of charity. They do it, perfectly reasonably, for money. Why don’t British people do these jobs? Why do our nurses have to come from Africa? There are three reasons, which no government dares do anything about.The first is the collapse of the old-fashioned family, in which the young learned how to behave. This is worst among the poor. Children who have never known a father’s authority, who arrived at school in nappies, have never shared a meal around a table, can barely read and who speak a sort of mumbled teen patois rather than English, are not going to be any employer’s dream.Forcing them to apply for jobs they don’t really want, from employers who really don’t want them and who would much prefer someone from Portugal or Poland, doesn’t actually solve this. The next is our shameful state school system, whose teachers are often themselves ill-educated. The system strives in vain to teach an academic curriculum to young men and women who really need vocational instruction, because we cannot admit that not all boys and girls need or want the same sort of schools. At the end of this process, the victims are forced into debt to attend university courses far inferior to old-fashioned vocational training. And the third is our welfare system, which responds to failure and misbehaviour by indulging it – a policy which ends by using tax revenues to teach criminals to take illegal drugs ‘safely’, and by handing them substitute drugs, so they can stupefy themselves legally instead. All these subjects lie outside the issues that ambitious career politicians are allowed to address. To do so, you would have to breach the modern taboos of sexism and egalitarianism. And you would have to do something even more heretical – argue that people are responsible for their own actions.Do any of these things and an army of media thought-police will come after you. Always assuming you aren’t forced to stand down as an MP, you will never get anywhere near office or power. We are in the grip of a soft totalitarianism which is no less deadly for being soft. Instead of threatening people with prison for having the wrong opinions, it threatens them with unemployment.If we actually had labour camps and midnight arrests, and state censors sitting in newspaper offices and TV studios, people might notice what was going on. As it is, they just wonder why everything gets worse and worse and nobody does anything about it.

Meet China’s secret weapon – Red Rambo

As we flounder over North Korea (whose leader learned from Iraq that Weapons of Mass Destruction are worth acquiring at any cost), China smiles behind its hand and quietly grows in power.There are many signs of this, but one of the most intriguing is the huge success in China of that country’s first blockbuster rogue hero movie, Wolf Warrior II. Made at great cost to a Hollywood formula, it depicts a Red Chinese Rambo, Leng Feng, played by Jing Wu.He cleverly manages to be both anti-authority at home, and super-patriotic abroad, and has won the warm approval of China’s Communist Party regime. On a revenge mission in Africa, a continent which obsesses the Peking government, he is a noble humanitarian who also defeats an American baddie.The old Soviet Union simply couldn’t manage this sort of propaganda. China, alas, has discovered the secret of how to mix capitalism and modernity with despotism. Some in what is now the free world may be tempted to follow.

Feeble courts are the biggest crime of all

How many times do I need to point out that our prisons are full because our police and courts are too feeble, not because they are too tough?Look at these figures obtained under Freedom of Information rules last week: a burglar who already had 44 convictions for break-ins was not imprisoned. Others left free included a lout who breached an Asbo for the 191st time, a so-called ‘joyrider’ with 26 previous convictions for taking cars, and, of course, a drug abuser with 29 previous convictions.It is very difficult to get such figures out of the criminal justice system. And police absence and uninterest – plus the public despair which discourages the reporting of much crime – means that many thousands of offences are nowadays committed without ever being recorded. A career criminal has probably committed dozens of crimes before the police ever arrest him, several more before he gets anything more than a meaningless caution or an (unpaid) fine, and even more before he gets weedy community service or a suspended sentence that is never activated. It is still much harder to get into prison than to get into university. Prison might scare such people into behaving if it was imposed on a first or second offence. If this happened, many others would be deterred from committing crimes at all.But waiting till someone is a hardened criminal before locking him up is useless against criminal individuals, and deters nobody. Hence the endlessly growing prison population. But the liberal mind is quite closed to the solution. So nothing happens.

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Look, I like Jacob Rees-Mogg. He generously helped out a few years ago in the battle to save this country from being forced on to Berlin Time. He has cunningly turned the mockery against him to his advantage. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he isn’t photographed soon wearing actual double-breasted pyjamas.But the excitement from both sides over his perfectly normal Christian positions on marriage and abortion is ridiculous. Mr Rees-Mogg certainly believes these things. But he hasn’t the slightest hope of doing anything about either. In our increasingly anti-Christian country, he is just taking on the role filled 150 years ago by the Victorian atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh, a lone parliamentary eccentric. The interesting thing is that Britain has, in so short a time, reached a stage where support for lifelong heterosexual marriage, and an aversion to killing unborn babies, are seen as eccentric, brave or outrageous opinions. Did you notice that happening?

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06 March 2016 2:00 AM

The really bad thing about modern politicians is the way they punish people for trying to be good. When a marriage is in trouble, the state takes the side of the spouse who wants to break it up. When a young student is starting out in life, he or she is forced to go deep into debt.All around us we see dishonesty and crime flourish, cynical loan-sharks and gambling joints allowed to prey on the weak and foolish, as the greedy and selfish push to the front of the queue and the kind and considerate are left till last.But until last week I didn’t realise what a horrible thing the Government has done to those on the verge of qualifying for their pensions after saving carefully all their lives. A reader, let us call her Kathy, wrote to me to explain exactly how this has affected her.Kathy is now 61 and has paid full National Insurance contributions for 39 years. Five years ago, she was made redundant. At first she went self-employed and held several contract or freelance posts, and one apparently permanent job which did not last. In fact, there are few of these around for anyone, old or young, these days.As she says: ‘I should have been able to draw on my state pension at age 60 but due to government changes I won’t get a state pension for another five and a half years. I am therefore expected to work until this age, which I don’t have a problem doing – except that I can’t find a new job.’No wonder. Far too many employers simply won’t look at job applicants in their 50s or 60s, leaving many thousands of men and women in a horrible limbo. To begin with, Kathy was able to get a small payment in the form of Jobseeker’s Allowance (not unjustly, as she has never ceased to seek work).Kathy has always done what she was brought up to do. She thought she had looked after her future. She lived frugally to buy her own home, while saving carefully for her retirement. But as soon as she took money out of her (very modest) pension pot to make ends meet, the Jobseeker’s Allowance stopped. When she protested, she was advised by an official to sell her home. As she says: ‘Why should I have to when I’ve now worked for more than 40 years, paid 39 years’ full National Insurance but am not able to draw on my state pension? ‘If the Government had not been under-handed in advising this group of women who fall within this age category then I would not be looking for any benefit help as I would have drawn my state pension at age 60.‘It’s disgraceful that women caught up in this very unfair change to their state pension should end up in the stressful situation that I now find myself in. I have no husband or partner to support me and have never expected any help until now.’I asked the Government about this, and they said blandly: ‘We have to take income and capital into account when calculating someone’s entitlement to means-tested benefits. ‘For those below state pension age, any funds held in a pension pot are disregarded, but if funds are withdrawn they will be taken into account.’ Well, yes, I can see that. But the nation owes Kathy the pension she paid for, and it’s dodging its duty. Why pretend there is such a thing as ‘National Insurance’ if it can simply be postponed for years to suit the Treasury which, as we all know, wastes money all over the place elsewhere? What would happen to a private company that promised a pension and then failed to deliver it on the promised date?I’m all in favour of a welfare state, for those who genuinely cannot cope and also for those who contribute. Is it so hard to design it in such a way that it cares for the truly needy, rewards the provident and is tough on the feckless and the cynical? It seems so.

Charity means ALWAYS saying No to beggars

One of the wickedest things you can do is to take advantage of the natural charity of honest people. The springs of kindness will dry up if people conclude that beggars are cheats and frauds. Every person who lies for a handout helps bring this about.Look at the wretched behaviour of Stewart Fenton, who pretended to be a homeless ex-soldier when he was neither of those things and was getting benefits.Is he the only one? About ten times a week I harden my already far-from-soft heart and politely refuse a beggar’s request for money (on one occasion when I wasn’t so polite I ended up with a black eye).Sometimes, if they claim to need the fare home from my local station, I say I will go with them to the ticket window and pay. So far they have always melted away at this point. But otherwise I try to prove to myself that I am not horribly mean by giving a fixed sum to a local homeless charity for each time I say ‘Sorry, no.’Actually, I think this is at worst a neutral thing to do. Giving cash seldom helps anyone, and often harms them. And these days you are often passing money straight to the drug dealers who sometimes stand visibly nearby, waiting menacingly for their money. What good does that do?Once again, many of us make the basic mistake of doing what makes us feel good, rather than what actually does good. Don’t feel guilty about saying no, as long as you help in other, better ways.

Of course France would never in a thousand years have considered giving a British firm the contract to make its medals. Quite right, too. The reason why we have even discussed awarding such a contract to the French is that we believe, as they do not, in the absolute rule of law – the thing which distinguishes us from all the rest of Europe. So when we sign an agreement saying our markets are open, we mean it. And when they sign it, they don’t. The only way we would ever prosper in the EU is if we sank to their standards.

You may wonder what happened to the three people arrested and held overnight for daring to protest at last October’s visit by the president of China, that callous, touchy and aggressive despotism. One of them was barged and grabbed by a helmeted police heavy. All, disgracefully, had their homes searched. All were, in the end, released without charge. In that case, how can this heavy-handed treatment possibly be justified?

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20 November 2013 2:46 PM

I’ve been distracted from worthier tasks by a strange article about me in today’s ‘Independent’ newspaper, which in all probability very few of you will have seen (though for reasons that will become obvious, it’s attracted quite a lot of attention from the Twitter mob).

I’m told off for not ‘following’ anyone on Twitter. My response is to misquote poor Polonius’s (excellent) advice to Laertes in ‘Hamlet’ , and advise everyone else ‘Neither a follower nor a trender be…’

As readers here well know, I regard Twitter as a left-wing electronic mob. I go there to respond to the stupid and ignorant attacks made on me, and to publicise this blog. I have plenty of ways of keeping up with the opinion of others, such as reading books, reading the papers and the weekly reviews, listening to the radio, conversing with family, colleagues and friends, speaking in debates. How 'following' someone on Twitter can even begin to compare with, let alone be better than, or supplement these things. I cannot think.

I’ve said here before that Mr Rentoul is a very useful writer, because he embodies the true spirit of Blairism, and his warm love for David Cameron, and his dislike for Ed Miliband, tell us much of what we need to know about what we must now (thanks to Nick Boles) refer to as the National Liberal Party. Tony Benn would say of him, I think, that he is a signpost rather than a weathercock, a man who sticks to his positions whichever way the wind blows, and doesn’t mind a bit of derision.

Even so, he is a bit young (born in 1958) to understand my political positions, and has perhaps lived in too rarefied a world. I read in Wikipedia that he worked for the small-circulation left-wing weekly ‘The New Statesman’ before going to the BBC, and then to the Independent, perhaps a rather restricted encounter with the University of Fleet Street. He also wrote a biography of the Blair creature, which I would describe as broadly sympathetic.

Anyway, to Mr Rentoul’s article. I really don’t know how he can claim I’m ‘not very interested in other people’s opinions’. For a start, I’ve *held* most other people’s opinions in my time, having been a supporter, in the mid-1960, of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and later of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the Anti-Apartheid movement, then a member, in turn, of the International Socialists (1968-75), Hampstead Constituency Labour Party (1977-1983) and the Conservative and Unionist Party, Oxford East Association (1997-2003). I still belong to Amnesty International (despite its absurd involvement in campaigns to save murderers from execution in the USA), which I must have joined about 30 years ago. I am also a member of Liberty, and was in the late 1970s a member of Friends of the Earth, not to mention various organisations for the promotion of cycling (an enthusiasm, from which I have never shifted). I have been a member of the National Union of Journalists for about 40 years. All these things cause me to pay frequent and constant attention to the opinions of people who disagree with me. I am a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England. I might add that since my university days I haven’t considered a day complete unless I have read at least four national newspapers, and preferably more. I’ve chosen twice to live abroad, once in the USSR and once in the USA, and in both places sought to immerse myself in the local culture and to learn, as deeply as possible, how they do things differently there. I’ve visited 58 countries, and have there sought out the opinions of prominent and influential people.

But I have never joined a club, despite two kind invitations to do so. In the end, despite the lovely Edwardian surroundings, the cosy bars, the warm feeling of being in a John Buchan thriller or an Evelyn Waugh novel that such places provide, I could never quite bring myself to do it.

I think that may be what irks Mr Rentoul - my unclubbableness and unwillingness to be part of any committed faction. I did sort of try this during the late 1990s, and found it didn’t suit me, though I also learned from it just how hopeless the Conservative Party really is.

Some of us are and always will be cats that walk by themselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t like other people, or aren’t interested in them, just that we’re happy on our own and uncomfortable in crowds or gangs.

His little sneer about book reviews shows how uninterested he is in *my* opinions. I’ve explained a thousand times how an occasional appearance on the seat on the edge on ‘Question Time’ is actually a confirmation of my marginal position in broadcasting, not evidence of my acceptance by the BBC mainstream.

As I sought to explain to him (though he plainly wasn’t listening) , the key to influence in British politics is to have an audience that stretches beyond your natural supporters. I don’t need to persuade Mail on Sunday readers of the virtues of patriotism and faith, or of the disadvantages of the cultural revolution. I badly need to persuade the others, and for that, I need at least a hearing. The drowning of my books in silence or ignorant abuse is, in my view, a conscious refusal to allow me that hearing. Most of the Left do not even know what *kind* of book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ is. They think it is a sort of nostalgic ramble, imagine it is of no possible interest to them, and would mostly be amazed if they ever opened it.

Likewise, the point of the conversation about social democracy has passed him by. He misunderstands my reasons for not being on the Left any more . I’m sure he hasn’t read my book ‘the Broken Compass ‘ (republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’) in which I explain this . As it mostly wasn’t reviewed, he’s probably never heard of it. If he has, he probably has a skewed idea of what it’s about.

He also probably doesn’t know how important Arthur Koestler, who identified strongly with the German Social Democrats in later life, was to ex-revolutionary socialists, as a bridge from Bolshevism into civilisation. Koestler had been hated by the Nazis. Now he was hated by the Communists. That, in the century of the Stalin-Hitler pact, was about as big an honour as a man could hope for.

People like me didn’t abandon Bolshevism because we wanted to grind the faces of the poor, leave the sick untreated and roofless, trap the poor in ignorance, or force half-starved peasants to work 90-hour weeks in sweatshops. Nor did we abandon it because it didn’t suit our careers to be seen as openly declared revolutionaries. We abandoned it because we loved liberty and hated lies, and because we saw that Bolshevism actually did grind the faces of the poor, smashed independent trade unionism, destroyed freedom of thought and erected citadels of privilege as bad as anything in the capitalist world, if not worse. I might add that it was often guilty of racial discrimination.

In my long, slow progress from what I was to what I have become, one of the key moments (it’s in ‘The Broken Compass’) involved paying attention to the opinions of the British TUC, and then travelling to Gdansk, to pay attention to the opinions of Lech Walesa, then the incredibly courageous leader of Solidarity. I still remember with total clarity that foggy, dankly cold morning in the scruffy Hotel Morski, the interview interpreted by a young student to whom I remain everlastingly grateful, who had happened by great good luck to be in the building at the time. That frozen, thrilling, frightening journey was made by me not as a foreign reporter but as a Labour Correspondent, because I had gone to my then editor, a wonderful, modest and generous man called Arthur Firth, and said that the most important industrial story of the age was the Polish shipyard strike against Communism. ‘You’re right. Go there. Get the visa’, he replied. I went. It changed my life. Here was the right to strike, as contentious and as menaced as in the days of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, being wielded by a poor electrician who was a blazing radical for liberty, and a solid religious conservative on every other issue you cared to name. He tested this combination in action – and it worked. That seemed good to me, and still does.

I was gripped, from then on, by the huge melodrama unfolding in the Warsaw Pact countries (I’d already had a much gentler taste of it on holiday in Prague). I was amazed at how uninterested most people were in this vast convulsion. I paid attention to that paradoxical part of the world, of ‘real existing socialism’, of what it really involved, and I weighed everything and everyone by their attitude towards it. Marxism had not failed because it had been tried in the wrong place by the wrong people, as the Gramscians and the Euro-Communists (who are the intellectual fathers of Blairism) believed. It had failed because it was fundamentally wrong. I knew, from my own adventures with Trotskyism and from my own hard experience of that lost world of the Evil Empire, exactly why. Very few people had both these experiences. My great failure is that I cannot seem to explain this to my own generation, possibly because it is just too obvious to me. Or possibly because they don’t want to know.

Mr Rentoul is right that I don’t think the Blair creature is in the Koestler tradition. He isn’t in any tradition, so far as I have ever been able to discover (and I did have some slight access to him before he was famous) . He was valuable to the New Labour project precisely because he was not that interested in politics, while his wife was a worry to them because she was, and could (if you looked carefully) be identified with the cultural and moral struggles which now define the New Left. That’s why I got into such trouble for taking such an interest in *her* opinions, and daring to research her forgotten campaign as a Labour parliamentary candidate in Margate in 1983.

Pretty stodgy, eh? You can see why someone like me might not be that worried that he was missing Chris Heaton Harris’s Twitticisms.

One other small thing. Micah Clarke ( as Mr Rentoul would find if he read that rather good and neglected book) was never a sectarian and always viewed these matters with a broadminded good humour (thanks to his interesting upbringing and childhood).

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11 September 2013 12:37 PM

Wars seem to start rather often at this time of year. Why are we so willing to consider new wars, knowing what we do about the horrors of conflict? One reason must be the enduring power of the idea of a ‘Good War’. The power of the World War Two cult is still immense, and plainly working even in the minds of millions as we stand on the brink of an attack on Syria, though less on the brink than we were. Some of you may have noticed, during my recent appearance on the Jeremy Vine show, Mr Vine’s response when I said it was a bit much for Britain to try to be a global policeman, when we couldn’t even police Manchester.

He said : ‘On that basis you wouldn’t get involved in the Second World War until you had eliminated all crime in the UK’ .

The assumption of this question (an assumption made semi-consciously, I believe, by almost every grown person in the USA and Britain) is that the Second World War was fought as a moral combat (the title of a recent history attempting to make this case, I thought rather lamely) to stop Hitler, because ‘we’ ( and who ‘we’ were, then and later, is an interesting question) regarded his government as an evil regime, and above all because he was engaged in genocide. It is also assumed that the more unlovely methods of war were generally confined to the German side.

There is only one antidote to this belief, which is a study of history. But history, in this case, is surrounded by a bodyguard of myth. The myth is a series of potent cameos, each of which forms a powerful picture in the minds of anyone of my generation, and many of which instantly summons an actual photograph to memory:

Here is the rough chain of events : ‘Reichstag Fire’, ‘Jewish shops boycotted in Berlin’ ‘Occupation of Rhineland’, ‘Anschluss’ ‘Munich’, ‘German tanks Roll into Prague’ ‘Invasion of Poland’ , ‘Resignation of Chamberlain – in God’s name, Go, ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ ’ ‘ Dunkirk’ , Battle of Britain’, ‘Finest Hour’, ‘Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat’ (one of the very few political promises ever delivered in full), ‘The Blitz’, ‘El Alamein’ , ‘D-Day and then ‘Victory’, followed by another victory after ‘Hiroshima’ , the creation of the NHS and the Permissive Society. And we all lived happily ever after. The more prosaic and complex truth is to be found in the gaps between these events, and also in a cooler evaluation of the events themselves. But few care to pursue this, reasonably fearing that they will get themselves into difficulties. Most firm opinions are sustained by this faint sense of not wanting to investigate one’s beliefs too closely, combined with a bilious fury at anyone else who asks us to do so.

I don’t blame people for preferring not to look. It’s unsettling. I have been unsettled ever since I looked into it, and the turmoil into which I was then plunged has never ceased. I now know roughly how a Victorian might have felt when he first began to question his Christian beliefs. But if your beliefs lead on to action, especially violent action, taken for moral reasons then I think you are obliged to examine your views.

I saw this week pictures of ‘Battle of Britain’ stained glass windows in an old RAF headquarters, recently restored. They are very striking, and one of them can be seen here

I know stained glass can be used for any purpose, but its associations are generally religious, and the sight of these windows, in one of which the Spitfire (viewed from above) resembles a Cross, reminded me of my view that the story of Britain’s heroic lone stand in war has become a sort of scripture, the story on which many people’s moral opinions are based. That, I think, is why the idea of moral bombing, of war as rescue, is so powerful in our culture.

Here it is necessary to state that nothing that I write here is a criticism of, or a repudiation of, the huge numbers of brave men and women who suffered dreadful loss and made appalling sacrifices to ensure that we were not defeated in that war. When shall their glory fade? My father and mother were among their number, both serving in His Majesty’s forces and enduring grave danger at home and (in my father’s case) at sea in hostile waters. I have to make this declaration to forestall the stupid slanders of one kind or another that are almost invariably levelled against anyone who examines this conflict with cool reason and factual knowledge. People will make them anyway, but one has to do what one can.

BUT this country did not go to war in 1939 because it disapproved of the Hitler regime. The British government had maintained cordial diplomatic and trading relations with the German state, and negotiated treaties with it (notably the Anglo-German Naval Agreement), long after the Weimar Republic had given way to the Third Reich. It maintained such relations even after the Kristallnacht events which showed even to the most complacent that Hitler was a Judophobic monomaniac, and that lawless persecution of Jews was undeniably German state policy.

The systematic mass murder of Jews, first by special squads of troops and then in extermination camps, a later and separate development, did not take place on German soil and followed the outbreak of war. These facts do not quite fit the ‘Good War’ theory and are often unknown to quite well-educated people, But when the anti-Hitler allies learned of this deliberate murder, thanks to the almost unbelievably courageous actions of those who obtained and smuggled out the truth, they consciously did nothing to stop it.

Many British people, especially of the liberal and enlightened sort, were highly sympathetic to Germany’s consistent view, before and after the arrival of Hitler in power, that the Versailles Treaty had been unfair. In fact, as A.J.P.Taylor points out, it is odd that we went to war over the control of Danzig, a German city to which Germany had a far stronger claim, under natural justice, than she ever had to the Sudetenland, over which we did not go to war.

The moralising left of the time, far from being keen on war with Germany, were opposed to rearmament and conscription until a few months before war came, and wanted an alliance with the savage regime then installed in Moscow , which would have had to have been based on appeasement of the USSR, especially in the three Baltic Republics, and probably in Poland and Finland too, not to mention Romania.

Indeed, it was our failure to agree any such appeasement of Stalin in 1939 which doomed the talks we held with the Russians in Moscow in the final months before the war. We would appease Stalin later, at Teheran and Yalta. It is certainly an interesting question as to whether we should have appeased him more actively in 1939. But would it then have been called appeasement? Most of our military experts thought at the time that the Red Army (most of whose best officers had recently been murdered by Stalin) wouldn’t have been much use as an ally anyway. Huge numbers of people believed that an alliance with Stalin’s secret-police state was morally intolerable. But in those days almost everyone in Britain regarded the deliberate bombing of civilians to be unacceptable. Interesting how morals change so quickly and so deeply.

‘Plucky little Poland’ , for whose independence we went to war, was not some sort of Scandinavian democracy. Nor was it, like 1914 Belgium, a blameless neutral. It had, for much of the inter-war period, been an openly repressive and anti-Semitic state, especially under the so-called Sanacja (Sanation or ‘cleansing’) regime. Poland aggressively grabbed territory from Czechoslovakia in 1938, as did Hungary, as part of the Munich carve-up. And it maintained good relations with Germany from 1934 to 1938, in a non-aggression treaty which Germany offered to renew, until the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland persuaded Warsaw that no such renewal was needed.

What is more we very nearly went to war with the USSR in 1939-40, when Moscow attacked Finland. Only some clever drafting by the Foreign Office ensured that our hurried and militarily worthless guarantee to Poland did *not* oblige us to declare war on Stalin when his troops marched into Poland from the East in late September 1939. Joint Nazi-Soviet victory parades (victory over Poland) were held in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno and Pinsk, parades of which pictures still exist, thus showing that Hitler and Stalin were in fact active allies, not just bound together by a non-aggression pact . German warships were also allowed to use Soviet naval ports which were later employed to receive British supplies. Soviet oil was essential to fuel the Blitzkrieg of May 1940 and the Blitz on London.

I make these points to underline the fact that we made a conscious alliance with an evil regime when we accepted that Stalin was on our side. Whatever the war may have been before this point, it cannot possibly be described as a principled campaign after we joined forces with Stalin.

It may be said that the Polish guarantee was a line in the sand (in which case it was one drawn in a very silly place, because it allowed Poland to decide when and if we entered the war) and we recognised some ‘need’ to go to war with Germany to contest with her the mastery of Europe. I see Sir Max Hastings, going by extracts from his new book, is making a similar argument about our supposed ‘need’ to go to war with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in 1914.

I am by no means sure about these ‘needs’. Our past (pre-1914) engagements against dominant powers in Europe had been fought largely on the oceans of the world, or in India or America, while we subsidised continental allies to do most of the land-fighting on our own continent. Marlborough and Wellington were great generals, and the British army of the time was distinguished by courage and resolve, but neither Blenheim nor Waterloo could have been won by British soldiers alone.

Prince Eugene of Savoy (it has always amused me to note) was Marlborough’s key ally at Blenheim. But things shift about on the Continent and it is interesting to see in how many cultures (and under how many different names) Prince Eugene came to be honoured later.

The Royal Navy named a ship after him (the Monitor, HMS ‘Prince Eugene’) which served in World War One, bombarding the Germans from the waters off Ostend. But the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Navy also named a battleship ‘Prinz Eugen’ after him (the two warships never met) , as did Mussolini’s Navy (a light cruiser, the ‘Eugenio di Savoia’). Hitler’s Kriegsmarine, too, honoured him. Their ‘Prinz Eugen’ was escort to the notorious battleship Bismarck, and ended up (after being captured) being used to see what would happen to a heavy cruiser in an atomic explosion, in the test at Bikini Atoll (she survived, more or less).

Then of course there is the role of Marshal Blucher and his Prussians at Waterloo, decisive in the defeat of Bonaparte. A cruiser named after him, crammed with SS men and Gestapo, was sunk by courageous battery fire in 1940 as it tried to force the Oslo Fjord (the majestic 64-year-old Colonel Birger Eriksen, in command of Norway’s Oscarsborg Fortress, gave the crucial order to fire, and sank the modern ‘Blucher with his museum-piece equipment). This unexpected reverse (the Germans expected no serious reistance) greatly slowed the German seizure of Norway and allowed the escape of the Norwegian King to London.

But I digress. My main point here is that Britain’s interests on the Continent vary quite a lot, and tend not be governed by any eternal friendships or sentimentality. Before 1914 they never involved the creation of a ruinously expensive land army on the continental scale. In 1914, and again in 1940, they did.

As for the ‘balance of power’, history seems to me to show that, while British intervention may put the occasional thumb or fist on the scales, such a balance exerts itself whatever we do. Bonaparte would not have been beaten at Waterloo if he hadn’t first been destroyed on the retreat from Moscow and then crushed at Leipzig. Hitler, I suspect, would not have been beaten in Normandy or on the Rhine had he not also been beaten first at Stalingrad.

And if Russia had been better-prepared for war in 1914 (particularly in the matter of guns and ammunition, which you would have thought were obvious needs in war) then Germany would have lost the First World War in the first few weeks . As it was, Russia’s total collapse in 1917 nearly led to *our* defeat in early 1918. That came far closer than most people realise, and had it done so, the feeble arguments for getting involved in 1914 , often couched in terms of the wickedness of the Kaiser’s ‘regime’ , would look even feebler than they already do.

I have also recently learned more details about how badly we were prepared for war in 1939. HMS Hood, one of the most beautiful warships ever built, was of course sunk by the Bismarck in 1941, being blown to pieces with the loss of almost everyone aboard. This was a huge national shock because ‘the Mighty Hood’ had for two decades been the shining symbol of British naval power.

I recently read an obituary of Vice-Admiral Sir Louis le Bailly in ‘The Times’, in which the two following notes appeared. They are deeply shocking to me, coming as I do from a naval family, aware of the deficiencies of naval spending and building between the wars but still convinced of the basic soundness of the fleet in 1939.

‘As a midshipman Le Bailly served in great ships such as the battlecruiser Hood, which sunned itself in Mediterranean ports under dazzling white awnings, while the bearings of her gun mountings were so corroded that one attempt to train the 15-inch "Y" turret through 90 degrees ended in disaster which was retrieved only by the brute force of tackle, capstan and the ship's tug-of-war team.

‘Such a navy was to be revealed as being an inadequate partner to the US Navy when war came, and with it the stern test of operations in the wide Pacific Ocean. Even the First World War four-stacker destroyers given to the Royal Navy by America in the wake of disastrous sinkings at the time of Dunkirk were found, by the astonished RN engineers who made them ready for sea, to be superior in such basic matters as boiler and steam pipe technology to the latest British construction of the time.’

I knew that the RN simply couldn’t keep up with the US Navy in the Pacific towards the end of the war, but had not known that things were so bad at the start. On the same lines, there’s a striking scene in Herman Wouk’s fascinating World War Two fiction ‘The Winds of War’ (one of the great Good Bad Books of our age, in my view) , in which his hero notes that the decks and scuppers of HMS Prince of Wales, carrying Winston Churchill to the Placentia Bay conference with Roosevelt (which resulted in the unsatisfactory (to Britain) ‘Atlantic Charter’) , are littered with discarded cigarette butts and other garbage. Wouk served in the US Navy, and I have always assumed that he either saw this himself, or was told it by a fellow-officer who had done so. And this was a new ship, in a way the pride of the Fleet (with a tragically brief future before her) .

Piece by piece, the old myth crumbles away. As A.J.P. Taylor points out in 'The Orgins of the Second World War' , much of what took place in Europe in the 1930s was caused by British and French illusions about their status as great powers, a status that (after 1914) they could no longer afford to keep up. France had her own interests in 1914, quite different from ours, I still believe (contrary to Sir Max Hastings) that we could have preserved much more of what made us great had we stayed out of the 1914 war.

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09 September 2013 12:40 PM

I thought it was time for some general comments and responses. First, a small basket of reproaches, perhaps brought on by a near-sleepless night, caused by a BBC experience late on Sunday.

Many months ago I offered Damian Thompson the hospitality of this weblog to make out his case that I am guilty of ‘scaremongering’ over the MMR vaccine, a claim he has repeatedly made, notably in his column in the Daily Telegraph. I deny the accusation. He seemed unwilling to take up the offer, but hinted that he might address it elsewhere. I am still waiting. I think that if he does not make out his case soon, I shall be entitled to believe that he lacks confidence in that case.

More recently, I responded to an attack on me by Ms Charlotte Vere, a would-be Tory MP, who claimed (on the basis of my support for full-time mothers) that I favoured making girls leave school at 14. I rebutted (and in my view refuted) this claim. She replied with a largely unresponsive article, which I posted here as promised, and to which I replied. Since then I have heard nothing but silence from her.

Talking of silence, can any of my readers give me any instance of any of the notable feminist voices of our age having spoken out against (or even commented upon) the CPS refusal to prosecute doctors who offered to abort baby girls, on the grounds of their sex? I am of course against this horror on absolute Christian grounds, in that I regard it is a form of murder, a prohibited act. But surely the anti-sexist sisterhood have their own solid reasons to object to it. Or do they?

As to the incident that kept me awake, it was the BBC’s choice of my old adversary Mehdi Hasan to present the Radio 4 programme ‘What the Papers say’ .

The last time Mr Hasan presented this programme, the BBC apologised on air for the way in which I was treated.

Summed up, the BBC view (upheld by the Trust and not even considered by OFCOM) was that my treatment on the programme (grotesquely caricatured voice, misquotation) was just a ‘mistake’ and had no significance of any sort. So far, my quest for an example of any comparable ‘mistake’ happening to anyone else on WTPS, ever, has come up empty.

After the OFCOM brush-off, I wrote to the BBC saying I would now take up the offer, which they made immediately after the ‘mistake’, to allow me to present ‘What the Papers Say’ , the first time I have been asked to present a Radio 4 programme this century.

I had felt I could not do so while my complaint was still being investigated. But having exhausted all procedures, I felt free to do so now.

I will break a rule here to say that I am at present engaged to present the programme next Sunday evening on BBC Radio 4 at 10.45 pm.

But how about this? So far as I know, and I have been paying fairly close attention, Mr Hasan had not presented the programme since the BBC apology, more than a year ago. I have no idea how presenters are chosen, or on what basis they are rotated. No doubt the choice of Mr Hasan to present the programme last night was entirely fortuitous. But I will leave readers to imagine the thoughts that went through my head when the theme music for the programme was followed by the sound of Mr Hasan announcing himself as presenter.

Some responses to comments. Can rational, intelligent contributors here please *not* try to debate with the fantasists who continue to believe ludicrous conspiracy theories about the terror attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001? These people have lost all contact with reality, will not be persuaded and are only encouraged when normal human beings try to contest this piffle. It is a waste of time for the rest of us, and may well cause a shortage of electrons in the long run.

I assume this contribution from ‘von Journo’ is satirical, and not to be taken literally : ‘The prehistoric classrooms Mr Hitchens refers to, with their terrifying teachers and violations of the pupils' basic rights, appear by modern standards to have been spectacularly unsuccessful. They might well have helped him, "an Olympic-standard maths duffer" to "an O-level in the subject". But In the modern, enlightened system, any duffer can earn a doctorate. Success in education no longer requires the accident of birth of being born clever. The contemporary educational system is much fairer and produces far more graduates.’

Once again the Finnish education system is held up for our delight. Scandinavia (though changing fast thanks to recent mass migration) is often alleged to be a post-Christian, egalitarian paradise by leftist secularists. The reality is slightly different, but there is one very powerful point that needs to be udnerstood here. Finland doesn’t suffer from Britain’s several deep divides, especially our class system, and does not have a legacy of huge, decaying ex-industrial cities where the worst urban conditions are concentrated. It is precisely because of these divides that selection by ability is such an important issue in Britain, and why it is banned by law by our egalitarian political consensus.

Even so, I suspect that measures of educational success in Finland’s schools suffer from the usual problems – the absurd lack of congruence of survey methods in different countries, the readiness of all education systems to judge themselves by more or less subjective outcomes (inspection reports, notoriously subjective, exam results, more concerned with paper qualification than with actual learning, concealed selection either by catchment area or by the encouragement of early leaving by the non-academic, etc etc etc). I would be very grateful for any impartial person with experience of the Finnish system to write in and tell us about it.

Perhaps I could ask ‘Nick’ to elaborate on the argument he offers here : ‘Mr Hitchens has an unerring ability to miss the point on every issue he raises.The problem with immigration is really the problem of welfare and the minimum wage. Without those things the indigenous population would be working and there would be no NHS and government schools and council houses etc for the immigrants to clog up. Problem solved. Unless of course you are a Socialist pretending to be a Conservative in which case you will ignore the issue altogether and distract people with elegantly written nonsense.’

It just so happens that the parties which have encouraged or failed to halt mass immigration are also keen supporters of the welfare state and the NHS, both of which existed before the mass immigration project was launched, and which coudl nto be abolished without the mother of all political upheavals.

I’m not sure that the minimum wage has made all that much difference, though there is no doubt that mass immigration has helped to keep it low without any difficulty. As opponents of the minimum wage pointed out when it was being introduced, it would either be so high that it damaged employment prospects or so low that it made little difference.

The government’s main intervention in wages has been the maze of tax credits, through which it has quietly subsidised low wage employers throughout the country. I have often wondered if this is really permissible under EU competition rules. Or perhaps the EU, like most people, simply haven’t noticed what is going on.

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15 July 2013 2:34 PM

I know from sad experience that a lot of left-wing people (and a lot of right-wing people) still think that socialism equals nationalisation equals socialism, and that Thatcherism equals conservatism. Oddly enough, their views are matched by a lot of golf-club Tories who thought that Anthony Blair was ‘The Best Tory Prime Minister We’ve Ever Had’. They really did say that. I remember the despair I felt when I heard it, just as I still feel despair when left-wingers moan moronically that New Labour never did anything for them. They even think that their ‘principles’ entitle them to be morally opposed to globalist anti-sovereignty wars like the Iraq invasion, which was always a left-wing war. Most wars these days are left-wing. Nobody’s keener on getting the bombers out.

It was largely to combat this absurd misunderstanding that I wrote my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ back in 1998, and I have struggled ever since to get anyone to read it. My later ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was another effort in the same direction. I couldn’t even get anyone to review that.

I fear that lot of the copies of my books that have actually been sold have been more in the nature of relics and souvenirs, as British conservatives are not great readers and I often find that people who say they are great supporters of mine are still stuck in the political categories of 1955, or 1915 come to that. I am quite sure that almost none of my political foes or critics has read any of my books, as it is very easy to tell from the ignorant attacks which they make on me. Only this week, a contributor here has hilariously accused me of being ‘Pro-Tory’, presumably because I attacked the Labour Party; and a left-wing ‘comedian’ has insinuated on Twitter that I am some sort of racial bigot (he has, to his credit, now apologised). I have (reluctantly) forgiven him, according to the rules by which I must abide, and have been chided on Twitter for my reluctance. To which I say, if forgiving were easy and painless, we wouldn’t need God to make us do it. I have also followed Brigadier Gerard’s old rule, that before forgiving one’s enemies, it is only fair to give those enemies something to forgive you for.

But I digress. Like all truly crazed and gigantic delusions, the idea that the Left has not changed its aims and methods since 1945 is much harder to combat with facts and logic than more minor deviations from the truth, which are generally easy to acknowledge. Most people, however proud, can eventually be persuaded that they have taken a wrong turning, misread a map or got an answer wrong in a quiz. But it is more or less impossible to get anyone to abandon a tribal political loyalty. Even UKIP is really the Tory party in exile rather than a true alternative (one of the reasons it is doomed to fall to earth at about the time the first stage separates from the main rocket).

What is the deep reason behind the fact, known to propagandists since Hitler , that a big lie is more likely to be believed than a small one? Hitler’s explanation in Mein Kampf was that the masses would themselves be ashamed to lie on such a large scale as their leaders do, and so cannot believe that their leaders are doing so.

There’s obviously something in that, though in the 1920s, when there was a good deal more deference towards politicians than there is now, it probably made more sense. It is the common currency of the masses, nowadays, that politicians are liars by trade. And yes, even as we say this, we vote for them (Or you do. I don’t).

My explanation is that most people do not think about big things at all, or see them clearly. They experience government, and policy, and even war, in small intense brushes and scuffles, from which they get strong and often mistaken impressions. The edifice of power it is so big that it cannot be examined without a great deal of cool detachment. Try taking a photograph of one of the huge Pyramids just south of Cairo. Unless you stand a long way back, your entire lens will be filled with dusty masonry. It does not begin to make sense, or reveal its true shape and nature, until you have moved far from it. Most of us get used to the presence in our minds of certain ideas, and never examine them. We are surrounded by mental pyramids, looming in our path. In trying to navigate among them, we seldom look at any of them as a whole. Once you have barked your shin on one, that will be your main experience of it.

Habits of mind and conventional wisdom about the world, once acquired from parents, teachers or church, are now acquired from TV and from teen peer groups, so that those who would once have been vaguely and ignorantly conservative are now vaguely and ignorantly leftist. Hence neither group understands why it believes what it believes, or much wants to think about it. Both groups will respond much more readily to tribal appeals than to reason or facts.

That, I think, is why what I do must , so far at least, be regarded as an almost total failure. I comfort myself that I have helped speed the inevitable collapse of the Tory Party, and that I may have slowed down the legalisation of cannabis. I like to think that the case for grammar schools has grown stronger and better-understood thanks to me. I played a small part in the fight to stop us joining the Euro, to prevent the betrayal of Gibraltar and in holding off the campaign to force us on to Berlin Time. But in general my impact on national life, given the tremendous pulpit I possess, is rather disappointing.

My main defeat is my failure to get across the simple fact that the Left’s chief aims are now moral, cultural and sexual, nothing to do with state ownership and very little to do with trade unions or the working class, which has more or less ceased to exist in the advanced countries.

Even quite smart people can get these things hopelessly backwards. And even those who grope towards the truth sometimes balk at it when they find it. Sir Simon Jenkins (who is gravely wrong about drugs, for reasons I can’t really understand, but is otherwise one of the smartest commentators in the business) had the most astonishing near miss a few years ago when he described J.Major, A.Blair and G.Brown as Mrs Thatcher’s progeny in a book called ‘Thatcher and Sons’.

Sir Simon had earlier helped deconstruct the Iron Lady myth of the Falklands and had annoyed a lot of Tories by pointing to Lady Thatcher’s penchant for nationalising things, especially local government and education. I might add that, with Arthur Scargill’s help, she also pretty much nationalised the police, though Roy Jenkins had begun that process with his forced mergers.

It only took one small step to reach the appalling truth.

If Major, Blair, Brown (and now D.Cameron and N.Clegg) were Thatcher’s sons, then she was their mother. And if she was Blair and Brown’s mother, then can she possibly have been the right-wing monster of legend?

Of course she wasn’t. She inherited much of the legacy of the Wilson and Heath governments (and remember, she was in the Heath government, not unwillingly) and left much of it essentially untouched. Her government was heavily statist. It taxed and spent heavily, drove Britain deeper into globalist and international and supranational bodies and alliances, weakened national laws and useable armed forces, declined to protect strategic industries form foreign ownership, centralised wildly and substituted regulation and exhortation for civil society.

Of course the hopeless ‘national curriculum’ for English schools is one of the best examples of this. No proper conservative could support such a monstrous idea, on principle. Schools should be independent bodies, institutions with their own self-government, staffed by properly-qualified and educated teachers with minds of their own, helped by the state to flourish and subject to external examinations. The idea that Monsieur le Ministre can tell them in detail what to teach is, well, Continental, not British.

And , given that it was instantly hijacked by the cultural revolutionaries who run British schools, and used to further their purposes, it was even worse.

Then there were ’grant-maintained’ schools. The fascinating way in which these schools were financed – a national, centralised body – was seldom if ever mentioned in public. But there it was, a nationalised state school system – now much swollen in the ‘Academy’ programme, which has now scooped up quite a lot of grammar schools and has even begun to swallow private schools (why are they joining? What do they think will happen to them when the government, into whose hands they have delivered themselves, is not just passively pro-comprehensive, but once again actively so?) .

Then of course there’s the nationalisation – expanded by every government for 45-odd years – of parenthood, with more and more mothers married to the state rather than a husband, and more and more children acknowledging the state, rather than an absent father, as chief provider. Not to mention the state encouragement of wage-slave motherhood at the expense of full-time mothers, and the resultant nationalisation of child-raising (so that nursery places are subsidised by the taxpayer, whereas full-time mothers are not). This leaves the natural parents, themselves exhausted, to put the poor mites to bed after long hours in day-orphanages with paid strangers. Wouldn’t it be simpler to go the whole way into Brave New World, and cut out the parents completely. They’d spend more on consumer goods if they weren’t stuck at home trying to do quality time with exhausted infants, doing their homework for them, or vainly trying to compete with the attractions of computer games, Facebook and the rest.

Old age, too, is becoming a state-sponsored experience for more and more people, and a very expensive and labour-intensive part of the nationalised sector it is too, which is perhaps why new ways are constantly being sought to shuffle the old off into the next world.

As for claiming that the state sector shrank in the Thatcher era, do those people who claim this not count the NHS and the local authorities, and endless, amoeba-like replicating quangoes, as being part of the state sector? The shifting of workers from direct to indirect state employment, kept going by the taxpayer but evading parliamentary accountability, was a masterstroke of Thatcherism.

The difference between the new nationalisation and the old is this .The new one does things that were far better done by individuals, small local institutions or even private bodies. The old one did things that were in many cases better done by national corporations, and have not in general been better done by private ones. Or it tried to rescue industries that had already been destroyed by incompetent government economic policies, and got the blame for their failure.

BT’s main advantage over the old Post Office telephones comes purely from the fact that its foundation coincided with the general availability of some fine new technology. But if the nationalised body had been able to introduce that technology, most people would have associated these ‘improvements’ with the nationalised corporation.

AS for the railways, often discussed here, a very useful corrective to the smug pro-privatisation propaganda of the neo-liberals can be found in this document from Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)

From this it is clear that the change is not a true privatisation at all, but a taxpayer-funded pretence at private railways, which costs far more (and is less efficient and much more heavily subsidised) than the nationalised BR it replaced. Nothing except a desire to follow neo-liberal dogma at all costs justifies its existence, but without the state discreetly holding it up, it would collapse. The current situation, in which the East Coast line is being run directly by the state and is certainly doing no worse than any of the ‘private’ train operating companies, is extremely interesting. If this is so, why do we need these train operating companies at all? Also fascinating is CRESC’s discovery of a huge secret subsidy to the train operating companies, engineered via Network Rail’s low track access charges, and the indefensible arrangements which govern the rolling stock leasing companies. Without the taxpayer to guarantee it , the whole thing would fall down in a heap. I cannot see what is conservative about this, or why conservatives should support it. But I can see that the New Left, anxious for state power to pursued its real agenda of globalisation and cultural revolution, would be willing to continue with such phantasms for pragmatic purposes. Because the globalisation and cultural revolution are what the Left really care about, so they are quite willing to sacrifice the railways for that cause.

Precisely because the left used to be in favour of nationalisation, it is now debarred from renationalising the railways, even though it would be the best course of action. Chesterton’s Law of the Truthful Paradox operates once again. The most ridiculous and unlikely things are often true, for a perfectly good reason that most people have not noticed.

Meanwhile the neo-liberals, who by claiming to be ‘Conservatives’ maintain the loyalty of their tribe, are happy to connive at the destruction of one of Britain’s greatest treasures( one which it invented and gave to the world and which would be a source of patriotic pride to any proper conservative) because by doing so they can persuade the deluded masses that they are in fact conservative. That’s also Chestertonian. Precisely by doing something profoundly unconservative, a group of people who are not conservative persuade another group of people (who really are conservative) that they (the fake conservatives) are real conservatives.

The facts, when stated, are so ludicrous as to be unbelievable. The truth is too big and too blatant to be seen, except by those who stand afar off. And so, when I advise the young to emigrate, my readers and listeners always think I am joking.

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01 May 2013 2:59 PM

This being May Day, my thoughts turn to the curious celebration that I witnessed there in Moscow’s Red Square in 1991, as a privileged Western reporter with a ticket for the enclosure just next to Lenin’s tomb (I still have that ticket, along with the matching pass that got me into the previous November’s Revolution Day parade, which turned out to be the last ever celebration of Lenin and Trotsky's 1917 putsch). Unlike the November event - a stern, menacing, militaristic display - May Day was an occasion of enforced jollity, compulsory balloons, collectivist simpering and general drivel. It was what I had in mind when I compared it to the Olympic opening ceremony in a column last year.

As keen readers will know, it was that comparison that embroiled me in a long struggle with the BBC, now finished though not really concluded. My contention, that the BBC has an institutional bias against people of my opinions, still seems to me to be under examination. I’ll let you know.

But there’s an underlying point here, too. What I wrote meant more to me than it meant to most readers, because of my direct and privileged experience. In this case, that experience was one of the most powerful things that ever happened to me (the others are more personal and private, and I won’t discuss them here, with the exception of a bad road accident I had through my own fault in 1969, which introduced me simultaneously to actual physical terror for my own life, and to blazing intense pain just short of blackout), my appointment and accreditation as Moscow Correspondent of a national newspaper.

I sometimes wonder if I should try harder to convey what a transforming thing this was. With a few months’ notice, I undertook an intense course in the Russian language which, thanks to a superb teacher, left me able to bluster in that difficult tongue to this day, but not to understand most of what Russians said to me, nor to be able to read the language in books or newspapers.

Next, I had to find, in that vast and clangourous city, an office and a place to live for my family, who were to join me as soon as possible. Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ the place was full of foreign journalists seeking the same thing, Official accommodation had long ago been allocated. I arrived by train on a lovely June day at the White Russia railway station, to be met by a group of Russian friends and acquaintances who did what they could ( and it was a lot) to help, but (after I had spent enough time in a costly hotel and then exhausted the hospitality of one other British journalist (bless her) who lent me her flat while she was on holiday) I spent my first few weeks moving from one temporary letting or lodging to another, including one particularly squalid one in a rough eastern district of Moscow.

Each time I moved, I had to shift my single large suitcase, my fax machine, my do-it-yourself telephone engineer’s kit and, after the first week, my gigantic Cyrillic typewriter , essential for official letters. This was done by flagging down a passing car and offering the driver quantities of western cigarettes, before setting off to the next place. My one advantage was that I had a copy of the CIA map of Moscow, the only accurate one in existence as it had been compiled form satellite pictures and was designed for easy use by spies (Cinemas were very well-marked, presumably because, being dark and possessing many entrances, they were ideal spots for shadowy rendezvous)… Don’t ask me how I got it.

But I have no doubt that my possession of this encouraged the KGB to believe that I was a spy myself. Certainly, they had planted an attractive English-speaking woman on the train I took from Ostend to Moscow (I had to notify my exact travel plans to the Soviet Foreign Ministry before setting out), who talked me out of a fix I was in Soviet customs at Brest-Litovsk, and soon afterwards offered to be my fixer and translator at an amazingly modest fee. I had no illusions about what was going on, but, as I wasn’t a spy, I was happy to accept the help for as long as it lasted. She was very efficient, but handicapped by the fact that she was a true believer in the Soviet system and so wouldn’t bribe anyone, or help me do so, which meant that about 80% of the things I wanted to do weren’t possible. As it happened, it ended abruptly a few months later, presumably at the point they decided finally that I was as hopeless as I appeared to be, and not just putting it on.

In the midst of all this I had to work, delivering news stories pretty much daily, and a weekly column on the details of Soviet life. It was one of the most intense periods of learning since I first went to boarding school(and I have always said that, had I not been at boarding school, I could never have coped with the homesickness, the repeated minor blows and setbacks, the solitude and the insecurity).

I have never forgotten a brief visit to my Oxford home, half-way through this process, and being asked for directions by an American tourist . As usual in Oxford, my directions were pretty good, based as they are on decades of intimate knowledge, and the tourist asked me ‘Do you live here, then?’. I had to swallow hard and say ‘No, I live in Moscow, as it happens’. And – this may give some indication of the intensity of being an expatriate – I felt like a traitor as I said it. Years later, when I finally returned home after two stints abroad, and had great difficulty in returning to normal life from the weightless, detached existence of the expatriate I remembered this moment very clearly. There is a kind of violence and loss in expatriating, from which you never completely recover.

I was already becoming a different person, a transient ghost in my own home town (where my house would shortly be rented to strangers and so closed to me, another strange experience) . By my own choice ( and I did not yet know if it was a crazy choice, as the whole mission might yet be an utter failure) I was living a weightless existence as an interloper in someone else’s country, and so turning into an outsider in my own. I cannot tell you how quickly you lose touch with the familiar when you are living abroad - especially when you have decided – as I did – to do it properly, and to come back only seldom, when absolutely necessary.

Moscow was now my home. By a tremendous stroke of good fortune I had by then found a place to live which I still regard as miraculous – a lovely apartment built in the Stalin era for a privileged member of the Communist elite. Here I was truly inside the Belly of the Beast. To live there was an education in itself. I had twelve-foot ceilings, oak parquet floors, chandeliers, tall windows looking out across a delicious curve in the Moscow river on one side, a serene and tranquil study with a view of the whole lovely city – from the University’s Stalin-gothic pinnacles on the Sparrow Hills , down to the golden dome of Ivan the Great’s Bell Tower in the Kremlin - on the other. On the far side of the clean, well-kept courtyard lived the heirs of Leonid Brezhnev, rumoured to occupy a whole floor. Near them, Yuri Andropov (his tenancy commemorated by a plaque near the entrance) had maintained a Moscow apartment for the days he had no time to get to his country house out in the woods where the elite had their true homes.

So, in a few short months I had learned a new language, been knowingly suborned by a spy, experienced the underside of one of the world’s greatest cities, until recently largely closed to foreigners, learned how to bribe officials, uprooted myself from the land of my upbringing and education (though not, oddly enough, of my birth) and discovered the absolute falsehood of the USSR’s claims to be an equal society, by being lapped in greater and more exclusive privilege than I have ever known, before or since.

This sort of thing has many effects (there’s much more I could tell, but no time to tell it) but one of the main ones is that it sets your mind free to think for itself in a way that 50 years of living in the same place will not usually do.

But how do I communicate this intensified and enhanced understanding to others, who have not been so blessed? Last night I was in York , haranguing a mainly student audience on the need to destroy the Conservative Party (the York student Tories, to their credit, kindly organised this event, and were extremely hospitable to me).

One of the things I need to explain is that socialists and communists have not stopped thinking. They have not ignored the failures of the 1917 revolution, nor the dead end of Attlee’s nationalisation programme. They have regrouped, re-examined the battlefield, turned to other things. The fact that your opponent is no longer trying to nationalise industry, and the fact that the old Bolshevik-influenced Communist Parties are one with Nineveh and Tyre, does not mean that the revolutionaries have gone away.

It just means that, following Antonio Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse ( or Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland) they have learned new ways to the old goal of the utopian society. The union barons are a spent force, a stage army of more use to Tory propagandists than to their own side. The battle has shifted into sex, marriage, morality, comedy, drugs, rock and roll, the abolition of personal responsibility, the spread of egalitarian and diversity dogma in schools, the civil service, the law, universities, publishing, broadcasting and the NHS, the anti-Christian frenzy, and the attack on national sovereignty.

The ‘Internationale’, old anthem of Communism, is now just a sentimental recognition of a revolutionary youth. The real anthem of the new revolution is John Lennon’s ghastly ‘Imagine’ , a version of which I heard this morning leaking out of the loudspeakers in my York hotel, part of the background noise of our age, sneaking into our minds as an ear-worm.

And because the Tories barely understood Bolshevism or Fabianism, and have never even begun to grasp the meaning of Gramsci,. Marcuse, Lennon or Jenkins, they are not fit for the fight, and – in some ways worst of all – have mistaken Margaret Thatcher’s Hayekian liberalism for a revival of their beaten cause.

In fact, it was another grave defeat for conservatism – which is actually a happy and free people’s reasonable defence of those things which make them happy – continuity, inheritance, modest but secure private property, limited government, national independence , a life ordered by conscience rather than a police force, and come to that beauty of landscape and architecture. That is why unhappy countries tend not to have much in the way of political conservatism.

My Tory opponent at the York meeting could do little more than regurgitate Central office handouts about deficit reduction (pah!) , mingled with embarrassing and historically inaccurate Thatcherolatry . What was interesting and amusing was that the more competent defence of the Tories was made by a spokesman for the York Labour Party, who repeatedly made it plain that he hoped they would survive, as they were a ‘party with which he could do business’. Well, exactly. Readers of ‘The Cameron Delusion’ will have noticed a similar view expressed by the left-wing pollster Peter Kellner, which I quote there.

Oh, and if any of you really care what I think about Thursday’s election, I urge you above all not to vote Conservative and, if you must vote at all (and why should you? You don’t buy goods you don’t want. Why vote for parties you don’t like and who don’t like you?) , to vote for UKIP, which is a useful weapon against the Tories – even if it has feet of clay and has no long-term future.

14 April 2013 2:09 AM

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

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06 April 2013 9:27 AM

Readers may be interested to know that I am on the panel for this discussion programme - the radio original on which BBC TV's 'Question Time' is based. It was recorded in (and transmitted live from) the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon on Friday evening.

Subjects under discussion include the Philpott case, bankers, the class system, Trident replacement and hate crime.

On the panel (almost identical to my last appearance on QT), The Right Honourable Lord Heseltine, Companion of Honour, Diane Abbott and the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb.

Watch out for the bit (33 minutes in) where I clash with the Right Honourable Lord Helseltine, Companion of Honour, over Trident replacement. He says 'You used to be in the Socialist Workers Party'. I say 'You used to be a conservative'. Amongst other things.

13 January 2013 1:14 AM

Britain cannot possibly afford its welfare state for much longer. Most people do not realise that state handouts (£207 billion a year) mop up every penny we pay in income tax (£155 billion a year).

Everything else, the NHS, schools, transport, police, defence, interest on the debt (nearly £50 billion a year, by the way) must be paid for by other taxes, including the vast sums raked in by so-called ‘National Insurance’, or by more borrowing.

As we are more or less bankrupt as a country, such generosity is not noble but plain idiotic. Yet we will not stop doing it. Change is politically impossible.

Last week’s fuss about supposed cuts in benefits was a sign of the swamp we are in.

There were, as usual, no actual cuts. A hesitant plan to cap future increases was met with angry hostility by many in politics and the media.

Emotions were immediately engaged and slammed into top gear. That is because this immense and unaffordable attempt to substitute the State for the married family is at the heart of the political revolution which began 50 years ago and is now reaching its sad and bankrupt end.

The very idea that people should provide for themselves has become a horrible heresy, a barbaric view that no civilised person can hold. We’ll see.

My own guess is that a hurricane of inflation will, over the next ten years, rip the welfare state up by the roots and leave us impoverished, diminished and baffled, wondering what happened to us.

Here’s what we spend.

One wholly justifiable payment is the old-age pension, which is startlingly mean but still takes up almost £80 billion a year, more than a third of the welfare budget.

I might add, because I continue to believe that this particular form of welfare very often hurts those to whom it is offered, that there are now 567,000 fatherless households being subsidised by the taxpayer.

Look at these figures and gasp. Where is the cash to come from? Think what else we might do with it.

I am sure a lot of welfare money goes to people who need and deserve it, whose problems are no fault of their own.

But I am just as sure that a lot of it goes to people who do not deserve it.

And on top of that, I know from my letters and emails how many people there are who have worked and saved all their lives, and who are therefore excluded from the most important benefits, when they need them most.

The working poor, who live next door to people whom they know to be cheating, are the most outraged by these abuses, and the most powerless to change them.

The new political elite, who hope to buy votes and power through handing out other people’s money, will not stop doing so until that money runs out.

And so we ramble merrily towards the edge of the abyss, making lemmings look responsible and far-sighted.

Pick on REAL collaborators, not Enoch

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Enoch was wrong. Mr Powell was nearly a great man, but demeaned himself with his rash and foolish catch-penny speech about ‘piccaninnies’ and rivers foaming with blood.

It is a special pity because of his many more important actions, including his brave denunciation of mistreatment of prisoners in colonial Kenya, his academic brilliance and his strong principles. Whatever he was, Enoch Powell could not have been a collaborator with Hitler, nor could he have been part of a government that rounded up Jews and sent them to certain death in National Socialistconcentration camps.

He actively hated Neville Chamberlain’s policy of making concessions to Hitler, and joined up to fight in 1939 as soon as he could.

But modern Leftists, who like to insinuate that all conservatives are Nazis at root, can’t understand that. I think this must be why the author C. J. Sansom thought he could get away with portraying Powell as a Nazi collaborator in his new thriller Dominion.

It’s all very well making up historical episodes that never happened but might have done. But if you bend the truth too far, you betray your craft.

Actually, many prominent Left-wing people in British public life did collaborate with Stalin’s communist tyranny.

If I ever take to writing thrillers, I could have a lot of fun – and stay within the bounds of truth – by taking their actions to their logical conclusion.

In the meantime, I suggest that Mr Sansom says sorry to Mr Powell’s family for this babyish, historically illiterate slur, before the book goes into paperback.

Police shouldn't act like a celebrity squad

Personally, I hope that the judge is not too hard on Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, who seems to have rung up the papers in a moment of madness, and now faces prison for doing so.

If this is enough to get a police officer locked up, then who shall escape? DCI Casburn was quite rightly appalled by the ridiculous celebrity-worship of the modern police. She saw how her colleagues were pathetically excited about meeting the actress Sienna Miller, to discuss her problems with phone hacking.

These cases are so much more interesting and urgent than a burgled pensioner, or a persecuted and lonely family such as the late Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca, whose miseries were ignored by police until Mrs Pilkington killed herself and her daughter in a blazing car.

May I volunteer to teach BBC staff our lovely, customary English measures, which they seem so keen to abandon but which are now to be brought back into schools?

The poor things are floundering with the foreign metric system, recently claiming that some cliffs in the Falklands (actually 600 feet high) towered to a height of ‘2,000 metres’.

This is because metric measurements are inhuman, and hard to memorise or imagine.

I am besieged by unhappy citizens distressed by the BBC’s decision to move a favourite programme, Sunday Half Hour, from its evening slot on Radio 2 to a pre-dawn timing.

One writes: ‘It is obviously a move to kill off one of the few Christian programmes.’

I suspect he may be right. The BBC’s right-on executives tend to treat older listeners as if they are already dead.

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